Users of mobile devices (such as cellular telephones) frequently use their mobile devices on networks other than their home carrier network. For example, users may travel to a geographic area that is not covered by their home carrier network, or may travel internationally and connect to an international network in order to use their mobile device.
Mobile device users often encounter problems that arise due to processing of wireless calls across home and foreign networks. A mobile device user may incur substantial roaming charges relating to calls received while using their mobile devices on foreign carrier networks. For instance, a call to the mobile user's device (while the device is connected to a foreign carrier network) that goes unanswered or is rejected may be forwarded from the foreign carrier network back to the home carrier network (such as to the user's voicemail), thereby causing the user to incur roaming charges for two separate legs of a single call. A foreign network may be any network (such as an international network, partner network, and so on), that is not a device's home carrier network. Further, calls to the mobile device may fail due to the unique configurations of some foreign carrier networks. Thus, there exists a need to dynamically process communications within the home carrier network in order to, for example, deflect certain calls to the user's device or voicemail, or otherwise ignore services provided by the unfamiliar network.
Currently, there are some established options to assist users in avoiding such problems. For example, (1) the user's home network may provide a service that allows a pre-selected list of calls to reach the user in the unfamiliar network, (2) the user may initiate an unconditional, non-dynamic call forwarding process that deflects all calls to the user to voicemail or any other forwarded-to number (3) the user may contact a customer care facility to manually activate call forwarding to voicemail or other forwarded-to number, and/or, (4) all call processing to be suppressed in registration database (such as an HLR or HSS database).
Although each of these established options provides some help to users roaming on unfamiliar networks, they do not provide a complete solution to the problems described above. They require user interaction to be performed or prevent call setup from occurring. Additionally, many of the options do not work unless the user's mobile device is switched off, which can be quite burdensome to the user. These and other problems exist with respect to assisting users of mobile devices located outside their home networks.